Food insecurity in the developing world killed the Doha round of trade talks today.

After 3 decades of pressure from trade negotiators, the World Bank, and the IMF to sacrifice local agriculture and accept imports of subsidized agricultural products from the developed world, and after repeated occurrences of food crises in developing nations that agreed, developing nations today killed the Doha Round of WTO negotiations over this issue.  The story  from Center for Economic and Policy Research ("CEPR") is here.  I provided some lurid background anecdotes in this earlier post. 

According to the CEPR release, the US industries that hoped to gain the most from the Doha round were pharmaceuticals, agriculture, telecommunications, and financial services.  Except for agriculture, it appears to me that "exports" from none of these industries would create or support substantial employment in the US.  Making the negotiations problematic from the US side were the facts that the President's Congressional authority to negotiate expired in June 2007 and the US was proposing reductions in US agricultural subsidies that were incompatible with the farm bill recently passed over Bush's veto. 

Update on Monday, August 25, 2008 at 08:44AM by Skeptic

For a much more extensive report on why the Doha Round talks collapsed, with numerous links to other sources, go here.  According to this article, food was not the only hot issue for developing nations.  West African nations made a strong push to get rid of subsidies to US cotton growers.  The idea of "food sovereignty" was further expanded in one initiative to include health care, education, water, telecommunications, and energy, all of which were described as human rights over which a nation could not properly surrender control. 

Some developing nations were angry that the developed world would not permit them to provide tariff protections to local industries during their getting-established phase--a tactic they pointed out had been heavily relied on by the USA and others during their industrialization phases.  Negotiators were also foreseeing that effective solutions to global climate change and the current financial crisis may clash with WTO prohibitions. 

Underlying all this was the perception that the promised benefits of free trade, structural realignment, and globalization had not arrived in the developing world, and that current projections of benefits are now much more modest than the halcyon projections of yesteryear.  Many other issues are also covered in the article, which I highly recommend. 

Update on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 08:26AM by Skeptic

Australia and Brazil were among nations that were hoping to use the Doha round to reduce or eliminate US susidies to farmers, and they are trying to revive the negotiations. 

Update on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 08:30PM by Skeptic

US family farmers' elation at death of Doha round is reported here. 

Update on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 09:43AM by Skeptic

Researchers at Oregon State University, UCLA, and Macalester College studied four African nations and found perverse effects of trade liberalization:

Despite good intentions, the push to privatize government functions and insistence upon "free trade" that is too often unfair has caused declining food production, increased poverty and a hunger crisis for millions of people in many African nations, researchers conclude in a new study.

The quotation is the lede in the press release announcing publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Indigienous farmers are not efficient, but they can maintain their families and communities. When exposed to highly-efficient and sometimes subsidized Western agricultural, they are driven out of business and are not able to find alternative employment. 

I reported here that NAFTA destroyed 1.7 million farming jobs in Mexico and that some Andean farmers have been driven by import competition to grow cocoa for illegal drugs. 

Update on Monday, November 14, 2011 at 04:41PM by Skeptic

Christine sent me a link to The WTO has failed developing nations in The Guardian.  It discusses ten examples of ways in which WTO has failed the poor: subsidies to cotton growers in developed nations, other agricultural subsidies in the rich world working hardship on developing world producers, ambiguous procedural rules for trade agreements favor sophisticated nations, failure to complete work on 88 special treatment rules for developing nations, slow-walking resolution of the tension between intellectual property protection and affordable medicines in the developing world, legal costs of WTO proceedings are so great that complaints by African nations are impractical, new protectionist economic policies in the G20 following the GFC, glacial decision-making to alter trade rules to alleviate natural disasters, minor developing nation influence on WTO decision-making, and 10 years of failure in the Doha round to make trade fair in the eyes of developing nations.